FU2 London / Southend-On-Sea

Above is an original 2-Track Demo Tape from late 1977 when the band were a four piece.

Above is the original 5 track master tape that the band recorded with Helen Wellington-Lloyd in August 1979. Tracks recorded were 'PG Tips', 'Maybe", 'Sorry', 'Soho' & 'Sindy Michelle'.

When I was asked to give a background description on myself, I thought where do you begin when you have lived over 50 summers? What page of your life’s book do you read from? So I will skip very quickly over the beginnings.

I was born in the east end of London in Hackney, so life was fast and you had to learn very quickly to be streetwise.

School life was OK in the beginning, but when I moved up to high school life started to become like a bit of a roller coaster. Somehow I was just a bit different to my other friends. I was always questioning what I was being taught. I had a thirst for truth and a lot that was being taught just did not add up, so at the age of just 13 I was banned from all schools and that was the end to my school education. For the story of why I was expelled for life is another story and may be told another day. Still as one page of my book ends, a new one begins.

I was much older looking than my years, bored senseless and needed to fill my life with something. I was able to enter pubs as I said I looked older than my age. That’s when I discovered music. The pubs had live acts, many were very old hippies playing long guitar breaks. There were so many different acts back then. I saw teddy boy bands, greasers, skinhead bands, heavy metal bands where Hells Angels attended with their swastikas on their helmets and bikes. Music was very territorial then and many fights were a common occurrence. Music had so many stories told in the lyrics and filled my mind with even more questions and dreams to aim for in my life.

I picked up a guitar and amp for £40 pounds. It was a black Yamaha semi acoustic and taught myself to play 3 chord songs very quick and loud. I also got very daring with my dress code. I bought a bright sky blue suit, a pair of teddy boys creepers also sky blue and to top it all I dyed my hair bright pink and sprayed it up 10 inches in the air. Today this much the norm, but in the Seventies this was just not done. I will try to describe how bad you got treated for dressing this way. The funny bit I just loved doing was walking over London Bridge early in the morning with all the office workers in their black suits and bowler hats and standard brollies staring. I stood out like a light bulb and the looks were just priceless. You see the city was a man’s world then, no woman was allowed to hold them jobs. People stood up when God Save The Queen was played at the end of the B.B.C broadcast.

 The bad bits were that people shouted obscenities at you all the time and you could not go into pubs and you were forced underground into offbeat places where you would find many others just like you. In these places you would see new movements being born. One that was just beginning was Punk Rock. While this was beginning I formed a band called FU2 and played many clubs with no money, but the vibe was just great. I met many bands before they become famous such as the Sex Pistols/The Clash/Siouxsie and the Banshees and many more. It was all about the music then. They played then had a pint with the crowd.

I met Helen Of Troy (Helen Wellington-Lloyd) in such clubs and we became very good friends. She was at Art School with Malcolm McLaren who, as you know today, became the manager of the Sex Pistols. I did not like Malcolm, in fact all he ever did was take other people’s ideas and claim them as his. He worked with Vivienne Westwood who also liked doing the same. They opened a shop called Sex to launch their punk clothing. Before becoming SEX in 1974, the shop was called ‘Let it Rock’ and then ‘Too Fast to Live, Too Young to Die’. It may have been Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren’s fetish boutique but the thing you don’t hear is that many designs were Helen’s.

Helen was the midget/dwarf in the film The Great Rock’N’Roll Swindle. One of many films where she came up with the ideas of safety pins, tartan trousers, tartan skirts, chains and many more for the punk image and got no credit for her designs, but that’s the industry.

She asked me could she sing a couple of songs with my band FU2. Helen was my friend and I know she could not sing well, but she was a showman and I knew she could pull it of visually so I wrote a few songs for her and we made a couple of videos together. I think they are different and off the wall and one of the lyrics is about Soho’s nightlife. The band FU2 went down different roads, but a very famous act today took the name and dropped the F and called themselves U2. There are many stories in my book. A term I think someone said to me is, “you have had a colourful life.” Don’t know about that, but these are just some of the pages out of my life’s book.

Terry Piper

2015

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